Pip: Names, nicknames, and the strange alchemy of how a word someone else gave you ends up defining a whole career — Literaturebyjessc has been doing some thinking, and it tracks.
Mara: This episode pulls from posts covering personal identity and naming, life advice across generations, and what it actually means to build happiness out of pain. Let's start with the names we carry and the ones we earn.
Personal Names And Nicknames
Pip: Every name has a story, but the interesting question is which name does the real work — the one on your birth certificate, or the one that follows you everywhere else.
Mara: The post on the nickname Jlo and the origin of Literaturebyjessc lays this out directly: "It was actually someone I call my brother who noticed my writing, and my creativity with music that told me to go further. I did not come up with the name Literaturebyjessc, he did, and I love him for it."
Pip: So the brand name, the one that landed in magazines and on Wikipedia, came from someone else seeing something before the writer did. That is not a small thing.
Mara: And the Jlo nickname runs parallel — given by an uncle because of a baby singing Jennifer Lopez songs, still in use thirty years later. Two names, both gifts, both stuck.
Pip: Names handed to you that end up fitting better than anything you would have chosen for yourself. Which is a decent segue into advice about time.
Life Advice And Reflection
Mara: The post "Stay This Little" responds to a prompt about the best advice for someone younger, and the answer is essentially: slow down, because adulthood arrives faster and costs more than you expect.
Pip: The bill arrives, and it is not metaphorical.
Mara: Right — and the post is specific about what gets lost: "enjoy life of not having to worry about nothing but getting homework done, your chores, and simply being a kid. Once you get older there is no turning back."
Pip: There is real weight in that framing. It is not nostalgia for nostalgia's sake — it is a practical warning about the texture of adult life.
Mara: The post also names something worth holding: the importance of surrounding yourself with people who want to elevate with you, not just exist alongside you. Community as a survival strategy.
Pip: Which connects directly to where the next set of posts goes — what you actually build when things get hard.
Pain, Happiness, And Resilience
Mara: The post "With Pain Comes Strength" starts with a misconception about happiness — that it arrives ready-made — and argues instead that happiness is something you work through, not into.
Pip: The tattoo detail earns its place here. It is not decoration; it is a tracking system.
Mara: The post puts it plainly: "Each time I go through something, I stare at that one tattoo and remember where I came from, and I start analyzing where I plan to go from there."
Pip: So the pain is not erased — it is made legible. Something you can read when you need direction.
Mara: And the post traces a concrete arc: disability at nineteen, writing as private processing, the writing destroyed, then rebuilt into a public platform — an LLC, an apartment, two jobs, college, all simultaneously.
Pip: The line about going from "the projects to making projects to Google to magazines and graduating" is doing a lot of work in a small space.
Mara: What the post resists is the idea that resilience means moving on cleanly. The framing is closer to: sit with it if you need to, but do not stay. "It's okay to sit around in it, but don't sit there too long."
Pip: And the post extends that outward — visiting others with the same disability, Zoom meetings, sharing hard moments publicly. The happiness that came from pain became something given back.
Mara: The post closes where it started: "Happiness comes in many different forms, different blessings, different environments." The strength is not a destination. It is what the pain keeps producing.
Pip: Names you did not choose, time you cannot recover, and pain that turns out to be load-bearing — not a bad set of things to sit with.
Mara: More from Literaturebyjessc next time. There is always more ground to cover.
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